I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

I remember that President Eisenhower's name was David Dwight Eisenhower, and that he changed it to Dwight David. I was puzzled by this: David seemed so much better a name than Dwight. I remember reading this in my red Britannica Junior Encyclopedia (D.C. to World Book's Marvell). I don't remember having an "I like Ike" button (which Roman Jakobson was to call the greatest political slogan, from a linguistics point of view, in the world), but my father told me I had one, even though they were all the staunchest of Democrats.

posted by william 12:59 AM
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